2600 debugging help requested

Piledriver · October 20, 2023

I am very frustrated with my 2600 programming experience - with debugging in particular! Initially I was using 8bitworkshop, but when my program got a tad bigger the debugger would just start jumping to some random place in the code making it unusable.

Later I switched over to "Atari Dev Studio (v0.9.2)" in "Visual Studio Code". The debugging features there are amazing! I can jump forward one instruction, one scanline, or one screen. I can even backup and undo my code jumps. The problem that I'm having in Atari Dev Studio (ADV) is my game is now 32KB (8 banks) and the debugger displays labels from all banks at the same time. If there is a label collision among banks it seems to pick one (at random?) and use that. It's like trying to find someone's house in a town but the streets are renamed with names from neighboring towns. Because of this my own disassembled code with all the incorrect labels everywhere looks like gobbeldy-gook when I step through it.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to fix this? This is literally making my job 10 times harder ... and 2600 programming is already hard enough. There's tons of great 2600 homebrews out there and I can't imagine those games got done under conditions like this.